22-year-old Georgian Islamist militant killed in Syria

TBILISI, DFWatch–A 22-year-old Georgian man is reported to have died in the Syrian war, fighting alongside one of the Islamist rebel groups.

Information Centre of Kakheti (ICK) wrote on Tuesday that Aslanbeg Borchashvili was from Dumasturi, a village in Pankisi Valley in the northeast of Georgia bordering Dagestan where most of the population belong to a subgroup of Chechens called Kists.

Citing a report on the local radio station WAY, ICK reported that Borchashvili left Georgia for Turkey together with his cousin Amiran Borchashvili in August 2015, and from there he travelled on to Syria. Before he left, he was a third year’s student of information technology at Telavi State University.

The report said nothing about when the latest death of a Georgian Syria fighter occurred. ICK estimates that fifty people from Pankisi have left for Syria and joined the terrorist group Islamic State, or Daesh. The news service, which publishes investigative reports from the region where Pankisi is located, published this list of sixteen Pankisi residents who have died in the Syria war: